Why use RiC-O?
Last updated on February 1st, 2024
If you are a records manager or archivist or provide services to them, and you are interested in making current or future archival record descriptive data available as Linked Data, then RiC-O will be of interest to you. RiC-O represents the first comprehensive standard for expressing archival description as Linked Data. While testing and refining RiC-O is ongoing, it is now currently consistent and mature enough along that one can use it.
The following list provides some of the reasons why you may want to begin exploring, testing, and using RiC-O, and to contribute to its ongoing development and refinement.
- RiC-O is a part of an international archival standard. The International Council on Archives (ICA) Expert Group on Archival Description (EGAD) is developing RiC. EGAD is an international group of individuals who work as archivists in diverse settings, as teachers of archival science, or as developers of systems for records managers and archivists. The members of EGAD collectively have expertise, both theoretical and practical, in developing archival description standards, in processing and describing archival resources, and in developing systems based on current and emerging technologies.
- RiC has for now three complementary parts: the Foundations of Archival Description (RiC-FAD), a conceptual model (RiC-CM)https://github.com/ICA-EGAD/RiC-CM and an ontology (RiC-O). RiC-CM is a high-level model of the concepts of archival description, and as such, it replaces the current ICA description standards ISAD(G), ISAAR, ISDF, and ISDIAH. RiC-O is a complete, specific implementation of RiC-CM, and as an implementation, it provides more details than are provided in the high-level RiC-CM.
- RiC-O is an archival domain reference ontology that provides a comprehensive vocabulary and formal rules for creating RDF datasets (or generating them from existing archival metadata) that describe in a consistent way all kinds of record resources and the contexts in which they were created and used over time. As it is a domain ontology, its vocabulary and structure are intended to reflect long-established archival principles, terminology, and descriptive methods.
- There are a variety of individual efforts underway to selectively create vocabularies for describing archival resources using a variety of existing familiar ontologies. These efforts might be described as inventing wheels based on selecting parts from existing familiar though distinctly different wheels, each of the latter designed and developed to serve distinct communities and purposes. All such efforts do not avoid “reinventing the wheel,” as each eclectically constructed ontology represents a specific combination of vocabularies. RiC-O is intended to be a broad, extensible standard that may be used in any archival descriptive context. The developers RiC-O are mindful of the rationale for using existing familiar vocabularies, and intend to address this over time by mapping RiC-O, where possible, to existing vocabularies.
There are a variety of reasons for developing a specific archival domain ontology:
- The conceptual models of libraries (IFLA LRM), museums (CIDOC CRM) and archives (ISAD(G), ISAAR(CPF), ISDF, ISDIAH, and now RiC-CM) are vastly different. The semantic concepts for very basic things like “person,” “title,” “author” or “provenance” greatly differ between these communities, even if the terms are shared among them. Using existing vocabularies, even when the same name is used, elides conceptual and scope differences that are significant. At the same time, relying on existing ontologies outside of the control of the archival community presents risks, as any one of these ontologies may change the meaning or scope of any given concept at any time, rendering its use in archival description inaccurate.
- A major way in which archival description differs from other cultural heritage description is that archival description focuses on set or groups of records (Record Sets) rather than on individual items (Records). More often than not, individual records are not described. There are both intellectual as well as economic reasons for this practice. Archival description, thus, inherently (though not exclusively) employs ordered hierarchies: Record Sets with other Record Sets or Records as members, and the members of Record Sets arranged in an order. No existing ontology models this method of description fully in a manner that reflects archival understanding and practice.
- RiC-CM and RiC-O focus on describing archival resources as intellectual objects, and intentionally do not attempt to address everything necessary for managing the physical Instantiations of the intellectual objects. There is nothing inherently archival about the management of analog or digital records (that is, the Instantiations), as managing the physical instantiations is a common requirement for all cultural heritage domains. RiC is designed, though, with the expectation that it may be extended using cross-domain ontologies specifically addressing technical data needed for the management of instantiations, for example, PREMIS.
- As an archival domain ontology, RiC-O is and will remain under the control of the archival community through ICA, and thus will focus on and respond to the needs of this community without being dependent on other communities for whom the archival community is not a primary responsibility.
- Though focused on the archival community, EGAD fully embraces cooperating with allied cultural heritage communities to facilitate interrelating and connecting archival resources with other kinds of resources through sharing established authority files for agents and places, controlled vocabularies for concepts, and standardized expression of dates. In this regard, EGAD, in the ongoing development and refinement of RiC-O, will provide mappings to other ontologies.
- RiC-O sources are now available on GitHub (https://github.com/ICA-EGAD/RiC-O), and thus the development process is open to all users. Anyone can clone the repository, create issues, or even fork and submit pull requests.
- RiC-O is fully documented in English. The internal documentation includes design principles and an overview. RiC-O also comes with examples and diagrams. So you can already find a significant amount of material that should help you start a project. EGAD will continue to improve the documentation and provide additional examples. Members of EGAD also often organize events and workshops to facilitate understanding and promote use of RiC-O.
RiC-O is already used by several institutions or projects, some tools already exist (see this page). If you want to start a project, there is an emerging community that you can consult. Do not hesitate to contact us! You may contact EGAD at email (egad at ica.org mailbox), or subscribe to, and use, the Records in Contexts users Google group**.